Abstract

Veronica Brady, vigorous supporter of Aboriginal causes and deeply concerned with social-injustice issues, underlined that Anglo-Australians were to be excommunicated from the land until they would come to terms with it and its first peoples (in Jones 1997). Nearly twenty years after this statement was postulated, it is my purpose in this paper to look at the land from an Anglo-Australian and non-Indigenous Australian perspective in order to assess if Australian contemporary society has moved beyond what Brady considered a “super ego status” and reconciled to the presence not only of its Indigenous, but also its non-Indigenous others. To do so I will exemplify novels which are part of and influenced by the matrix of relations and social forces in which non-indigenous Australian writers are situated on, including Suneeta Peres da Costa’s Homework (1999) and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (2013).

Highlights

  • In 2009 the Australian media coined the term “curry bashing” to refer to a wave of attacks on Indian students which prompted demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney and remonstrations from India

  • Rudyard Kipling’sfamous ballad resonated on both sides and a debate erupted as to whether Australia was still a racist society that reacted to the presence of these Indian students-migrants along the colonial binary of East vs West

  • It can be argued that Australia has never been a cultural monolith, nor the location of an immutable and monochromatic society

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Summary

Introduction

In 2009 the Australian media coined the term “curry bashing” to refer to a wave of attacks on Indian students which prompted demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney and remonstrations from India. Michelle de Kretser and Suneeta Peres da Costa, used here as exponents of South Asian-Australian writers, seem to claim for a theoretical shift which ranges from cosmopolitanism to planetary conviviality.

Results
Conclusion

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